WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claims to have a cache of unreleased e-mails that portray Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as a “liberal war hawk.” Assange indicates that the whistleblowing website has as many as 2,000 Clinton State Department e-mails beyond the 30,322 already made public.
In an interview with The Guardian, Assange, who has been a political refugee at the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012, insists he believes that the Clinton campaign has been keeping a close eye on him and that Clinton will never be indicted unless the FBI “pushes for concessions.”
He added that Attorney General Loretta Lynch is not likely to let Clinton be indicted for her role in covering up Clinton’s use of personal servers to send and receive classified e-mail. “She’s not going to indict Hillary Clinton, that’s not possible. It’s not going to happen,” Assange said during a television interview.
Assange comes across as an inveterate opponent of Hillary Clinton, pinning the Benghazi tragedy and the wider Libyan intervention squarely on her shoulders, pointing out that the Pentagon was against the operation.
“They [the military leaders at the Pentagon] predicted that the postwar outcome would be something like it is … she has a long history of being a liberal war hawk,” he said.
In case that wasn’t clear enough, Assange added, “What we have with Clinton is someone who is a hawk but who has the tools of legal interventionism, a rhetorical cover to start the wars, and someone who seemingly wants to start them…. From Wikileaks’ perspective, Hillary Clinton is a problem in terms of war and peace.”
Hillary Clinton is not the only target of Assange’s accusations. He purports to have evidence that Google is secretly supporting Clinton’s run for the White House.
Google, he said during an appearance at an event in Moscow, “is intensely aligned with US exceptionalism,” claiming that if Clinton’s presidential bid is successful, Google will reward its employees for their dedication to that cause.
Whether this last accusation proves factual, there is no debating that the e-mail scandal from her days as secretary of state continues to dog Clinton’s campaign.
On May 26, The New American reported on the latest development in the investigation into possible wrongdoing by Clinton:
In an astonishing display of nonpartisanship, the State Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) published its conclusions on Wednesday following its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server installed at her home in Chappaqua, New York. In its 83-page report, it concluded that she lied about having gotten approval for use of the server and the personal e-mail account that it served. It further noted that when staff members (while she was secretary of state) questioned her use of it, they were told to shut up, go away, and never to mention it again.
With WikiLeaks threatening to keep the kerfuffle at a rolling boil, Hillary Clinton is likely to reciprocate by keeping Assange under close scrutiny. Scrutiny is something Assange is accustomed to, however.
Assange sought refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in June 2012 after the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom denied his application to reconsider his appeal of an earlier decision by that court.
The case brought before the Supreme Court of the U.K. concerned whether a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) issued by Sweden for Julian Assange was valid. In its ruling of May 30, 2012, the seven-member panel of judges held that the EAW was valid, and as a result Assange now may be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual assault.
The events that led to Assange’s initial arrest (without charge or due process) are well known.
In late July 2010, WikiLeaks released the so-called Afghan War Diary. These documents are a collection of internal U.S. military logs of the war in Afghanistan that appear to confirm Pakistani aid to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as the disclosure of the numerous civilian casualties of the military action of the United States.
In the days following the Afghan War Diary release, Assange traveled to Sweden hoping to establish residency and to move the headquarters of WikiLeaks there in order to take advantage of that country’s liberal whistleblower laws. Assange admits that while in Sweden he had consensual sex with two women in August 2010, but he is accused of molestation, coercion, and rape. Assange denies the charges. As the case against Assange stands today, a district court in Stockholm ruled last month that there was still “probable cause for suspicion” against the WikiLeaks founder. The statute of limitations for some of the lesser charges against him is past, put the rape allegation will stand until 2020.
Although Ecuador has extended its diplomatic cover to him, Assange fears that if he is forced to return to Sweden, that country might then extradite him, for political reasons, to the United States, where he could face serious charges of espionage or conspiracy, potentially warranting the death penalty, regarding WikiLeaks’ disclosure of the Afghan War Diary and other documents revealing the U.S. government’s purposeful deception in its prosecution of illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Regarding the Clinton e-mail scandal, while it seems that the Justice Department is having a hard time collecting and sorting through Hillary’s state department e-mail archive, others aren’t finding the task quite so daunting.
On June 13, oilprices.com reported:
Reliable intelligence sources in the West have indicated that warnings had been received that the Russian Government could in the near future release the text of e-mail messages intercepted from U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server from the time she was U.S. Secretary of State. The release would, the messaging indicated, prove that Secretary Clinton had, in fact, laid open U.S. secrets to foreign interception by putting highly-classified Government reports onto a private server in violation of U.S. law, and that, as suspected, the server had been targeted and hacked by foreign intelligence services.
All of these revelations have the feel of an October Surprise, and should the claims made by Julian Assange and the Russian government prove legitimate, this October Surprise could cause a November Defeat.
Obviously aware of this, Clinton’s Republican challenger, Donald Trump, has ramped up his rhetoric regarding Clinton’s responsibility for the deadly assault on Benghazi and her failure to produce e-mails and to prove they were not sent on unsecure servers in violation of U.S. law. He may need the help, as the latest national poll has Clinton ahead of Trump nationwide by 12 points.
Should Assange and Russia come through with their promise to publish evidence of Clinton’s willful disregard of federal law in the use of private servers to transfer classified data, Hillary Clinton’s lead in the polls could be very short-lived.
